So does the card overclock?

At stock speeds the Gigabyte GV-3D1 is already a very formidable videocard,
but when do we ever leave well enough alone? Overclocking the GV-3D1 might be a
difficult task as the two GeForce 6600GT cores together generate quite a bit of heat.
As you would expect, there's only one slider available per device when overclocking an
SLI setup (whether you're using RivaTuner or the coolbits registry hack) and
you have overclock them together.

While we've had some luck overclocking other GeForce 6600GT based videocards we
didn't really know what to expect from the Gigabyte GV-3D1. By default, both
cores are clocked at 500 MHz, so we just raised the clock speed at 1-2 MHz a
time. Unfortunately the GV-3D1 test card didn't seem to be up to challenge and
we could not run the core even 1 MHz above stock speeds. If we did, the
drivers or RivaTuner would complain about the hardware failing.

The Gigabyte GV-3D1's memory runs at 1.12
GHz by default which is 120 MHz faster than single-GPU Geforce 6600GT cards. Upon closer inspection of
the videocard, we noticed that Gigabyte actually equips the GV-3D1 with Samsung K4J55323QF-GC16 GDDR3 BGA memory, and
not the usual 2ns stuff! That explains the higher clock
speed.

As with the cores before
it, we were not able to push the memory even 1 MHz higher. If we tried, the
overclocking utility would complain about the hardware failing its
tests. As you can imagine we are
a bit disappointed at these results, but I guess you can't win them
all.

Just to test, we tried overclocking the videocard
in single GPU mode. To our surprise we were actually able to overclock! The core
didn't go very high, maxing out at 519 MHz, but the memory did pretty well
hitting 1.23 GHz!

In any case
the Gigabyte GV-3D1 is pretty quick at stock speeds and unless you're trying to
break a 3DMark record, you really don't need to overclock.